Beauty experiments with the SP 90mm Macro

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Beauty experiments with the SP 90mm Macro

Sarah Schmid and Philipp Johann are two young photographers from Cologne. With the stage name Sallyhateswing, both of them always cause a stir with their creative photo actions. For a beauty shooting, the duo now took advantage of the Tamron SP 90mm F/2.8 Di VC USD Macro objective and they were impressed by the sharpness in the details.

“A macro objective is maybe a little unusual for beauty photos, as too many details in the skin can be difficult in this subject”, says Sarah. “We nevertheless deliberately decided for the Tamron SP 90mm, as the focus was on the structure and the composition of the make up with the photos. In particular the contrast between shiny areas and matt parts should be shown clearly in the image.”

The photos with the model Linda Glauber and make up artist Katharina Zimmermann were an experiment. The two photographers wanted to try different make up effects: Which effect does a face with a high colour change have? What happens if the lipstick goes beyond the contours of the lips and has a different, more granular structure? Which effect does eye shadow have if it is only applied to the underside of the eyes?

TAMRON SP 90mm F/2.8 Di VC USD MACRO 1:1 | 1/125 s | f/11 | ISO 100

Unusual model look

“In keeping with the unusual appearance of the model, we wanted to achieve an androgynous look, hardly emphasising the femininity of the model”, explains Phil. “The nude look should also help to make the different make up effects stand out optimally.”

The SP 90mm proved to be optimal for this claim. “The sharpness is great even at full aperture. To get the maximum and to also achieve a good depth of field, we faded however to f/11“, reports Sarah. This resulted in a very subtle out of focus effect in the full format sensor.

TAMRON SP 90mm F/2.8 Di VC USD MACRO 1:1 | 1/125 s | f/13 | ISO 100

Every detail is visible

“As we wanted to capture even the finest detail, the short close focusing distance of 30 cm was perfect. “The quiet auto focus and the VC image stabiliser are two highlights of this objective, which for us, however, played no role in this series, as we mainly focussed manually and used a tripod. All in all a wonderful macro lens, with which one can work perfectly even with beauty photos in the studio.”